There must have been some mighty long faces in the CNN newsroom when the missing Malaysian airplane story petered out. Now what were they going to obsess about 24/7? Maybe…serious news? Like the midterm elections? Ha! Who are we kidding?

Well, praise the good Lord for creating the little wiggly bugs and the germs, because now CNN has ebola. Is ebola a serious topic? Yes, but not when CNN is covering it. First, there was the endless dissection of what the nurses at Texas Presbyterian Hospital might or might not have been wearing when they treated Thomas Eric Duncan. It’s one thing to report that there were significant lapses in hospital protocol. It’s another to spend many hours speculating about what these lapses might have been because you’re trying to kill time before the next CDC conference. Then, when the nurses were being moved to other hospitals, CNN treated us to live coverage of the vehicles transporting the nurses, including ominous shots of the airplanes which were going to fly them to their destinations. Why did we need to see that? Were there infectious bodily fluids condensing on the wings? This provides more evidence for my personal theory that CNN + airplanes = pure ridiculousness.

So thank you, CNN, for showing us yet again that you are capable of taking any news story and riding it straight into carnival barker territory.

Ah, but there was also something missing for me in the coverage…some elusive element…I mean, besides substance. I wasn’t sure what it was, but then I remembered Don Lemon playing with his toy plane, and it all came back to me. The news anchors need a prop! And I know just the thing–the plushie version of the ebola germ, brought to us by Giant Microbes. You can take your plague reporting to a whole new level of dramatic when you’re waving an actual germ around in the studio. Hope you listen to my advice, CNN! You can’t make things much sillier than you already have, you know.